The historical Buddha's most famous statements on women came about when his stepmother and aunt, Maha Pajapati Gotami, asked to join the Sangha and become a nun. The Buddha initially refused her request. Eventually he relented, but in doing so he made conditions and a prediction that remain controversial to this day.

Pajapati was the sister of the Buddha's mother, Maya, who had died a few days after his birth. Maya and Pajapati were both married to his father, King Suddhodana, and after Maya's death Pajapati nursed and raised her sister's son.

Pajapati approached her stepson and asked to be received into the Sangha. The Buddha said no. Still determined, Pajapati and 500 women followers cut off their hair, dressed themselves in patched monk's robes, and set out on foot to follow the traveling Buddha.

When Pajapati and her followers caught up to the Buddha, they were exhausted. Ananda, the Buddha's cousin and most devoted attendant, found Pajapati in tears, dirty, her feet swollen. "Lady, why are you crying like this?" he asked.

She replied to Ananda that she wished to enter the Sangha and receive ordination, but the Buddha had refused her. Ananda promised to speak to the Buddha on her behalf.
- snip -
A Bhikkuni (nun) even if she was in the Order for 100 years must respect a Bhikkhu (monk) even of a day's standing.source : buddhism.about.com

quote
Shōkozan Tōkei-ji (松岡山 東慶寺), Tokei-Ji
also known as Kakekomi-dera (駆け込み寺) or Enkiri-dera (縁切り寺)),
is a Buddhist temple and a former nunnery, the only survivor of a network of five nunneries called Amagozan (尼五山), in the city of Kamakura in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. It is part of the Rinzai school of Zen's Engaku-ji branch, and was opened by Hōjō Sadatoki in 1285. It is best known as a historic refuge for women who were abused by their husbands.
It is for this reason sometimes referred to as the "Divorce Temple".

The temple was founded in the 8th year of Koan (1285) by nun Kakusan-ni, wife of Hōjō Tokimune (1251-1284), after her husband's death. Because it was then customary for a wife to become a nun after her husband's death, she decided to open the temple and dedicate it to the memory of her husband. She also made it a refuge for battered wives.

In an age when men could easily divorce their wives but wives had great difficulty divorcing their husbands, Tōkei-ji allowed women to become officially divorced after staying there for three years. Temple records show that, during the Tokugawa period alone, an estimated 2,000 women sought shelter there. The temple lost its right to concede divorce in 1873, when a new law was approved and the Court of Justice started to handle the cases.

quoteRewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in theLife of Nun Abutsu 阿仏尼 (1225–1283).

Abutsu crossed gender and genre barriers by writing the first career guide for Japanese noblewomen, the first female-authored poetry treatise, and the first poetic travelogue by a woman—all despite the increasingly limited social mobility for women during the Kamakura era (1185–1336). Capitalizing on her literary talent and political prowess, Abutsu rose from middling origins and single-motherhood to a prestigious marriage and membership in an esteemed literary lineage.

Abutsu’s life is well documented in her own letters, diaries, and commentaries, as well as in critiques written by rivals, records of poetry events, and legal documents. Drawing on these and other literary and historiographical sources, including The Tale of Genji, author Christina Laffin demonstrates how medieval women responded to institutional changes that transformed their lives as court attendants, wives, and nuns. Despite increased professionalization of the arts, competition over sources of patronage, and rivaling claims to literary expertise, Abutsu proved her poetic capabilities through her work and often used patriarchal ideals of femininity to lay claim to political and literary authority.

They walked the streets, clad as niso 尼僧 nuns. Thus it was easy for them to be called inside to perform their trade in the back room of a rich businessman, officially doing some prayer service.
Some lived together in cheap lodgings called - bikuni yado 比丘尼宿

Some were put on boats along the river Fukagawa for their duties, calledfunabikuni 船比丘尼

uta bikuni 歌比丘尼 singing nun
begging for a living (and performing other kinds of service)

In 1743, it is said there were more than 5800 woman of this trade in Edo.

sennen bikuni 千年比丘尼 a young nun for 1000 years
never growing old, because once she ate the meat of a "human-fish"

The "human fish" 人魚 (ningyo) is most probably a Dugong.
Whoever eats its meat will live for 1000 years without changing his/her features. - source : Dugong dugon -

A young woman eats a piece of fish found in the left-overs of her father, a fisherman.
When she learns about the fact that it was a "human fish" she decides to become a nun to atone for her deed. And then . . .

There are many legends about her in many parts of Japan, after all she lived for 1000 years with the features of a beautiful woman. When she stayed at a temple for a while, people became suspicious of her never-changing beautiful features and eventually she had to leave for another place. Often she planted a walking stick in the temple compound before leaving, which sprouted to live on . . .

Yashima Kameyama 八島亀山 in Okayama 岡山
After the young woman had left her birthplace . . there was a young man from Kameyama, who visited the temple 善光寺 Zenko-Ji in Nagano, where he saw a beautiful nun in the temple and told her about Kameyama、so she became quite homesick. When he went back and told the story to the fishermen in Kameyama they went to the back of Mount Boyama 坊山 and found the remains of her old small temple. There was also an old tree, byakushin ビャクシン / 柏槙 (a kind of mountain juniper) to our day, which had sprouted from her walking stick.
This tree was then found to have a disease infecting the Japanese pear trees nearby and was cut down eventually.

In Asakuchi 浅口, Okayama in the hamlet of 貞見 Sadami
there is another tree that has sprouted from her walking stick. It has sprouted, as she had foretold, "tsue wa ikitsuku made" 杖は活き着くまで. . . and now there is another hamlet with a pun on that nearby : Tsukuma 津熊 .
The tree that sprouted from her stick was a huge yanagi 大柳 willow tree.
It was so strong and perfect that the tree was cut down and its trunck became a beam for the famous 三十三間堂, 京都 Hall of 1000 Buddha Statues in Kyoto, Sanjusan Gendo.

- quote -
One of the most famous folk stories concerning ningyo is calledYao Bikuni (八百比丘尼, "eight-hundred (years) Buddhist priestess") or Happyaku Bikuni.
The story tells how a fisherman who lived in Wakasa Province once caught an unusual fish. In all his years fishing, he had never seen anything like it, so he invited his friends over to sample its meat.

One of the guests, however, peeked into the kitchen, noticed that the head of this fish had a human face, and warned the others not to eat it. So when the fisherman finished cooking and offered his guests the ningyo's grilled flesh, they secretly wrapped it in paper and hid it on their persons so that it could be discarded on the way home.

But one man, drunk on sake, forgot to throw the strange fish away. This man had a little daughter, who demanded a present when her father arrived home, and he carelessly gave her the fish. Coming to his senses, the father tried to stop her from eating it, fearing she would be poisoned, but he was too late and she finished it all. But as nothing particularly bad seemed to happen to the girl afterwards, the man did not worry about it for long.

Years passed, and the girl grew up and was married. But after that she did not age any more; she kept the same youthful appearance while her husband grew old and died. After many years of perpetual youth and being widowed again and again, the woman became a nun and wandered through various countries. Finally she returned to her hometown in Wakasa, where she ended her life at an age of 800 years.

Ningyo (人魚, "human fish", often translated as "mermaid")
is a fish-like creature from Japanese folklore.
Anciently, it was described with a monkey’s mouth with small teeth like a fish’s, shining golden scales, and a quiet voice like a skylark or a flute. Its flesh is pleasant-tasting, and anyone who eats it will attain remarkable longevity. However, catching a ningyo was believed to bring storms and misfortune, so fishermen who caught these creatures were said to throw them back into the sea. A ningyo washed onto the beach was an omen of war or calamity.
..... Fishmen 魚人 Gyojin
- More about ningyo Ningyo (人魚) "human fish" : - source : wikipedia -

One day a fisherman went fishing near Hiraizumi, when a strange old man living in a cave gave him a strange red fish to eat.
His companion 五郎三郎 Gorosaburo did not eat the fish meat but took it home with him and told everyone not to eat it. His young daughter of 6 years named シイラ Shiira was so tempted to eat this meat, she did not listen to her father's warning and ate it.
After this Shiira never died and lived as a nun for at least 200 years. Now nobody knows where she is.
The old man is said to have been 海尊仙人 Kaison Sennin.

After the death of 平泉の秀衡 Lord Hidehira in Hiraizumi, his retainer Gorosaburo took his life to follow his master, as was the custom of the times.
The wife of Gorosaburo took their young daughter Shiira and hid at 本吉郡の竹島 Takeshima Island in the Motoyoshi district.
The Heavenly Nymph at the Cave of the same name at Takeshima island 竹島の天女洞 refers to the girl Shiira, who lived more than 250 years, always looking like a woman in her forties.

Togura 戸倉 - Takeshima 竹島
Different from the other islands in the inlay, this island is of a soft white rock.

shiira 鱰／鱪 / シイラ is the name of the common dolphin, Coryphaena hippurus.

Written in 1690, 元禄3年
It is not clear where Basho stayed when he wrote this hokku.
But it expresses a deep solitude and simplicity in the life of the nun, with just some white azaleas to brighten her hut.

This hokku is from the 10th month (November) of 1819, the year evoked by Issa in Year of My Life. Two nuns in the vegetable field of a Buddhist temple large enough to have a nunnery are working hard to pull daikon radishes out of the hardening early winter earth. Long, thick daikon radishes resemble giant carrots. Pictures of daikon made in Issa's age show them to be between a foot and two feet long and 4-5 inches around, though the varieties widely grown today tend to be a bit shorter. The radishes planted by the temple seem to be long ones, since it takes two gentle nuns, grasping the leafy stems at the top of the radish, to pull this one out of the ground.

Issa has many hokku, often humorous, about pulling up daikon radishes, but I can't help mentioning this one from 1803:

each time I pull
a long radish up
I watch the clouds

daiko-hiki ippon-zutsu ni kumo o miru

It takes so much effort to pull up a single long radish that when the radish suddenly does come out of the ground the momentum carries Issa backwards until he lands on his back in the field, giving him a nice view of the sky. I wonder if the nuns in their long robes also enjoy gazing at the clouds.

Although these long white radishes are usually called daikon ('big root') in modern Japanese, in Issa's time they were commonly called daiko, which has three syllables. This is usually the pronunciation found in haikai, since daikon is four syllables long and harder to fit into lines. Even today the old pronunciation can be found in the name of a ceremony at Ryoutokuji Temple in Kyoto to give thanks to Shinran, the founder of the temple and of the True Pure Land school of Buddhism. On Dec. 9, the Daiko-daki (Daikon Cooking) Ceremony is held, during which fresh slices of daikon radish are boiled in a broth that is given to visitors to the temple and placed before an image of Shinran.

Women Living Zen:
Japanese Soto Buddhist Nuns
Paula Kane Robinson Arai
In this study, based on both historical evidence and ethnographic data, Paula Arai shows that nuns were central agents in the foundation of Buddhism in Japan in the sixth century. They were active participants in the Soto Zen sect, and have continued to contribute to the advancement of the sect to the present day. Drawing on her fieldwork among Soto nuns, Arai demonstrates that the lives of many of these women embody classical Buddhist ideals. They have chosen to lead a strictly disciplined monastic life instead of pursuing careers or leading an unconstrained contemporary secular lifestyle. In this, and other respects, they can be shown to stand in stark contrast to their male counterparts.

Paula has a long history of study of Japanese female religious; this is the result of fieldwork spent in a Soto Zen nunnery and historical analysis. The fieldwork was done in the context of the anthropological turn to "reflexivity," which is a swank academic way of saying that the book is sympathetic and involved. Accessible and very informative on the influence of women in the early development of zen and their subsequent marginalization.- source : www.amazon.co.uk

Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way
Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist Literature
of Medieval Japan
R. Keller Kimbrough

According to a sixteenth-century Japanese commentary on the Lotus Sutra, the venerable Chinsô Kashô was once preaching on the “ten wickednesses of women” when an angry old nun stepped out from the audience and shouted, “It’s not just women who are so evil—you’ve got plenty of wickedness in you, too!” Women were reviled in much of the popular Buddhist rhetoric of medieval Japan, castigated for their “filthy femininity,” but their low spiritual status was in fact frequently contested. This dispute over the place of women in Buddhism was often played out in the realm of medieval preachers’ and storytellers’ apocryphal tales of the lives, deaths, and inevitable religious awakenings of prominent female literary figures of an earlier age.

Inspired by the folklorist Yanagita Kunio’s groundbreaking work of the early 1930s, Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way explores the ways in which such fictional and usually scandalous stories of the Heian women authors Izumi Shikibu, Ono no Komachi, Murasaki Shikibu, and Sei Shônagon were employed in the competitive preaching and fund-raising of late-Heian and medieval Japan. The book draws upon a broad range of medieval textual and pictorial sources to describe the diverse and heretofore little-studied roles of itinerant and temple-based preacher-entertainers in the formation and dissemination of medieval literary culture. By plumbing the medieval roots of Heian women poets’ contemporary fame, Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way illuminates a forgotten world of doctrinal and institutional rivalry, sectarian struggle, and passionately articulated belief, revealing the processes by which Izumi Shikibu and her peers came to be celebrated as the national cultural icons that they are today. - source : www.cjspubs.lsa.umich.edu -

Scholars have widely acknowledged the persistent ambivalence with which the Japanese religious traditions treat women. Much existing scholarship depicts Japan’s religious traditions as mere means of oppression. But this view raises a question: How have ambivalent and even misogynistic religious discourses on gender still come to inspire devotion and emulation among women?

In Women in Japanese Religions, Barbara R. Ambros examines the roles that women have played in the religions of Japan. An important corrective to more common male-centered narratives of Japanese religious history, this text presents a synthetic long view of Japanese religions from a distinct angle that has typically been discounted in standard survey accounts of Japanese religions.

Drawing on a diverse collection of writings by and about women, Ambros argues that ambivalent religious discourses in Japan have not simply subordinated women but also given them religious resources to pursue their own interests and agendas. Comprising nine chapters organized chronologically, the book begins with the archeological evidence of fertility cults and the early shamanic ruler Himiko in prehistoric Japan and ends with an examination of the influence of feminism and demographic changes on religious practices during the “lost decades” of the post-1990 era. By viewing Japanese religious history through the eyes of women, Women in Japanese Religions presents a new narrative that offers strikingly different vistas of Japan’s pluralistic traditions than the received accounts that foreground male religious figures and male-dominated institutions.

Even though Heian noblewomen had very sendentary lifestyles, they stillengaged in frequent pilgrimages to temples near the capital. This paperexamines the rituals that constituted their pilgrimages, or monomode, andtheir motivations to undertake these religious journeys. These women wereof aristocratic background and therefore commanded considerablewealth—a factor that naturally shaped their pilgrimages, turning themnot only into expressions of personal faith but also displays of power andstatus..https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2637.